Tuesday, 6 September 2011

A baseball game at the Resettlement Administration Rimrock Camp near Madras, Oregon: photo by Arthur Rothstein, July 1936

Spectators at a baseball game, Washington, D.C.: wives, sweethearts and children of the players; passersby and regular fans: photo by Marjory Collins, July 1942

Baseball game at the annual field day of the FSA farmworkers community, Yuma, Arizona: photo by Russell Lee, March 1942

Watching the baseball game at the annual field day of the FSA farmworkers community, Yuma, Arizona: photo by Russell Lee, March 1942Saturday morning baseball game, FSA camp, Robstown, Texas: photo by Arthur Rothstein, February 1942

Amazing selection/collection and thank you for it. Brings up lots of sweet memories (and some not so). But what struck me this morning and always does when I see photos from those times is how rare obesity is. Most on the field and in the crowds are in the kind of shape people have to go to the gym and/or practice strict diets and/or have some kind of trainer or operation or etc. to achieve. Back then it was just "natural" (and I assume the result of less processed food and more regular daily labor, as well as budgets that didn't allow for any excess).

The observation concerning the better physical shape of the population is fascinating and I'm sure all the cited factors are correct. However, I also wonder where stress fits in. I recognize, of course, that there's always been plenty of stress, but the current quality of enervation (viewed, at least, through the selective and narrow scope of my own knowledge and experience) seems to be worse and more dreadful than it was when I and the world were younger. Curtis

Tom, for once I'm speechless. I can only say that the reuniting-in-progress 1965 Michigan Little League State Champs have been instructed to look over your shoulder at the gathered wisdom of your vision. (Hope this doesn't disturb long-time TC patrons as you might detect greater interest in the national pastime from your emerging fan base.)

Grateful to hear others found this cultural retrieval project engaging. The kind voices help make all the crazy work (almost) make sense.

I worked at baseball parks in the mid 1950s, and thus, in close proximity with the players, was able to see that they were for the most part as skinny as the majority of the general rural populace, from which they largely came.

Coincidentally I have just remarked to my captive inhouse audience upon the astonishing slenderness of the aptly nicknamed Harry Franklin "Slim" Sallee (1885-1950), a pitcher for several National League clubs, who was six foot three and can't have weighed much more than a long willow stick.

He is featured, as it happens, among diverse other players of the game, in today's sequel:

Those barefoot ragamuffins Arthur Rothstein photographed at the FSA camp in Robstown, Texas might be said to be "swinging out of their shoes" -- that is, if they had any.

These wonderful photos remind me, too, that the participant/spectator gap was once much, much smaller than it is today.

Players and watchers were once close enough to rub shoulders, or to trade mitts and run out into the field and (as in my memory of sandlot games, in which short sides often meant a no-right-fielder-so-fly-balls-to-right-are-automatic-outs rule) take up a position in the outfield... and drop a flyball... all part of the joy.

(I grew up on Austin Boulevard in Chicago, not too far off there was a rough diamond at Columbus Park, summer days meant showing up early and staying until dark, choosing sides by the fists-around-the-bat-barrel method, getting by with one bat till it cracked, one ball till it unraveled, and everyone who owned a mitt leaving it in the field between "ups" for a player on the other team to use. But we did have actual shoes, of a sort. And mothers whose sons were missing all the livelong day, and thus out of their hair, were probably well suited by the entire ragtag arrangement...)

Yes, these are shared memories, like those mitts we all shared - days with 5 on a side or days with 13 on a side.

One very special memory from Jersey was of an adult, whom everyone called Uncle Ray. He always brought a good couple of bats and balls, he oversaw the organizing of sides (hand over hand on bat, clinging desperately to the tip of the knob if you wanted to get on the same side as your best friend) and he pitched for both teams for the entire game. Never batted. He made sure everybody played, nobody got picked on or left out. His pitching was adjusted to each batter - those too young for overhand, got it underhand.

And some of those were great games. It was as close to organized little league as it got for some kids and it was a thrill. We played till we couldn't see the ball, and then played a bit more.

Wonderful indeed. And just this coda, from things my father (God rest his soul) said to me later, it's clear that stress levels were just as high or higher at the end of the Depression. What was simpler (among many things) was demands on your attention. We listened to the big fights on the radio and music and some baseball, but you could drift in and out without a flickering screen demanding your eyeballs full attention. There were some readers around, but mostly people socialized, sitting around on stoops and porches while the kids ran around or played games including not just sandlot baseball but around my way something we called box ball, which was pitching to a strike box chalked on a wall or the side of a building (no catcher necessary) using one of those pink, what were they spalding? rubber balls and the batter had a broom stick or some other skinny stick. Simpler times.

I'm on the brink of going all Ed on everybody by sharing my memories of that particular form of the game, though in Chicago we never had a name for it that I recall.

In one wondrous abandoned schoolyard the wall on which the Zone was chalked was so high only the rare mile-high "foul" popup was lost forever upon the roof.

(Not that we did not attempt to clamber up there, risking life and limb, not to mention arrest, for one of those pink spaldings, if it was the last one... which it always was.)

The wire fence surrounding the schoolyard was, it seemed, so remote as to require a Ruthian clout to lose a spalding over it. Another positive feature.

And best of all, no windows to break.

In the apartment-block alleys behind our residences, conversely, the cramped circumstances posed no end of problems.

(The breaking of windows of righteously infuriated citizens who had the misfortune to dwell adjacent to any impromptu urchin stadium was a constant hazard... and in fact one such upstairs tenement resident, whose back porch abutted on a much-used back-alley-turned-ballpark, came down one time and -- he was an ex-Marine who could legendarily do 100 one-arm pushups -- kicked our wee urchin butts. And we had no complaints, knowing we so richly deserved it, and further that a butt-kicking would probably avert the dreaded phone call to the parents of the guilty.)

Mike, I think that the slow-going rhythms of baseball on the radio were indeed conducive to a more relaxed up-growing or grown-upping, as the case may have been.

But really, no cell phones, blackberries, pagers, texters or other forms of being linked in 24 x 7 to the idiot beehive electronic mothership -- the freedom from all that, permitting us to actually tune in on an immediate non-virtual environment, whether fruitful or fraught, was a blessing we were necessarily unable to appreciate at the time.

But looking back now -- after a night experience of terrible urban stress on the bus, a silly white girl slanging a black bus driver for being late to a stop, the imbroglio accelerating to one of those intense, suffocating little suppressed race-wars which make urban life such a constant nightmare -- all I can say is... thanks for the memories.